This is my knee-jerk reaction to litter. The rural lane by my house resembles a kind of linear tip, with a fag packet, coffee cup or plastic bottle every few feet. The small parks near where I work in London look like supersize skips, filled with fried chicken boxes. Even my own garden hosts a few plastic bags in trees, blown in from elsewhere. Every year it seems to get worse. I hate it, I hate people who litter and I think it’s time we treated them like the antisocial slobs they are.

As I say, this is my gut reaction. But like all gut reactions, it’s worth examining properly. Let’s start with my perception that litter is getting worse – as people always imagine things are getting worse. In fact it’s actually worse than I’d imagined. According to a 2009 report by the CPRE and the Policy Exchange, since the 1960s, littering has grown by 500%. Moreover, says the charity Tidy Britain, local authorities spend nearly £1 billion picking up litter every year.

It’s true that a few people have attempted to reverse this rising tide of garbage. A few years ago the author Bill Bryson tried to convince us to stop turning our green and pleasant land into an approximation of the town dump. He even suggested some fairly tough measures (although Bryson is so genial that he could make capital punishment for stealing bread sound pleasant). Alas, his nice-ish entreaties fell on deaf ears and our streets and parks and hedgerows are no cleaner. So I believe the time has come get nasty.

Before we do, though, we should ask ourselves if litter really is as black and white as oiks despoiling our country because they can’t be bothered to walk five feet to a bin. Here, I did a little thought experiment comparing littering to a couple of other, similar blights – dog mess and graffiti. Not picking up after your dog is disgusting, horrible and selfish. But I can sort of understand why you might not do it: carrying a bag of warm poo can ruin a pleasant walk in the woods. Carrying an empty Coke bottle, by contrast, is an inconvenience that is trivial to the point of non-existence. And graffiti? Most graffiti does ruin the environment in a way that is similar to litter - and more permanent. But a small percentage of graffiti improves the environment – and the very best is art. Also, unlike littering, the decision to tag a motorway overpass involves considerable effort and even physical courage. Whereas littering is just the abrogation of effort and responsibility.

If we can agree that littering is slovenly and reprehensible, we should also ask ourselves how bad its effects are. We already know that it costs around £17 a head annually to clear up. But does it do any worse than offend my middle class sensibilities? Here, again the answer is an unambiguous “yes.” First, tourism accounts for about 9% of UK GDP and is worth £127 billion a year. Tourists really like our beautiful castles and countryside and they really dislike lay-bys full of crisp packets and fly-tipped plasterboard. Second, litter kills wildlife. The connection between chucking bits of plastic on the ground and cute animals dying of starvation is a demonstrable fact. It’s not even one of those join-the-dots facts like fossil fuel use and homeless polar bears. It’s a dead-hedgehog-with-its-head-stuck-in-a-plastic-cup fact.

So there you have it. Not littering is a minuscule effort on your part. And littering has serious aesthetic, economic and humane costs. If you litter, you are at best ignorant and at worst selfish, mindless and callous. Yet this message seems lost on huge swathes of the British population. It’s not just the poor either. For every fag packet I see flying out of the window of a Transit van or clapped out Ford, I see a Starbucks cup chucked out of an Audi or Range Rover. We’re all it – and we all need to be told - and not told nicely.

I’d start at the source – and get tough with our retailers, by taxing and banning over-packaged goods and carrier bags. I wouldn’t consult with the supermarkets here. This has been done, ad tedium, and nothing has happened. Besides, if I was the environment minister, I’d probably consider it my job to protect voters from large corporations, not the other way round. If the CEO of some retail leviathan got all Ayn Rand on me, I’d tell him to stop whining. If the state picks up the trash your highly profitable operation creates, then you are shifting a cost of doing business onto the taxpayer. Now get back in your box or we’ll start scrutinising your planning applications properly.

In one fell swoop, this would solve a good chunk of the litter problem. Everyone would moan for about a fortnight before most of us got used to those bags for life and Guardian readers fell in love with 70s macramé string bags all over again.

Next, I’d educate kids. This would be honest and unflinching. Here’s a cow that had to be killed because it choked on plastic bags. Here’s a dead dolphin. Here’s a boy dropping a crisp packet. Here are the Christmas presents he didn’t get because he was caught on CCTV and his parents were fined. As I say, no more Mr Nice Guy.

There are already, in theory, fines for littering. But I’d ramp these up and enforce them with the kind of zeal that would have Dirty Harry gasping with mute admiration. Hundreds of pounds for your first offence. Thousands for subsequent offences. Points on your licence if you – or anyone in a car you are driving - chucks litter out. If you can’t pay, great, you can work off your fine picking up litter on motorway verges at minimum wage. I’d probably do a bit of naming and shaming too – just to remind the rich that, even if you can afford to litter, you need to put those Chanel bags in the bin.

Finally I’d work on changing our national attitude. Bring back the ubiquitous anti-littering campaigns of the 1970s. And remind ourselves that not everything about the rather conformist society we had back then was bad. We need a bit more collective disapproval. We need little old ladies telling 15 year olds off when they drop a sweet wrapper – and if the 15 year goes off on some tirade about half-imagined rights, we need a crowd of bystanders to step up and tell him what a horrible little scrote he is.

I think it can be done. Smoking, not wearing seatbelts and drink-driving have all become largely unacceptable in my lifetime. And all of these were a result of legislation and hard-hitting education, not asking nicely. So too with litter. It’s time to put away the carrot and start using the stick.